(Neal Peirce is a syndicated columnist who writes about local government issues. His columns do not reflect the opinions of County News or the National Association of Counties.)
Bring on "skinny streets" to create a safer, more intimate, walkable neighborhoods, says a citizen-government alliance called Livable Oregon. Narrower roadways create prettier settings, seal less land under asphalt, decrease storm water runoff and actually create higher property values.
And if highway engineers object, tell them a new day's dawning, that fire engines can get through 24- instead of 34-foot-wide streets perfectly well.
Economic growth and more human scale development - the kind of neighborhoods we built before World War II - can go hand-in-hand, argues Livable Oregon. And it's hardly alone these days.
Two thousand miles to the east, Bluegrass Tomorrow, operating in the horsey bluegrass counties around Lexington, Ky., is saying: "Whoa - let's look where we're headed. How do we save our bluegrass from the sprawl?"
The recently published "Bluegrass Handbook" helps communities use traditional town planning principles to build neighborhoods that are not just attractive and efficient, but have a strong sense of place.
And visitors to Charleston, S.C., are being given a folder - "How You Can Take Part of Charleston Home With You." It proclaims that historic and gracious Charleston's principles of good urban design can be applied anywhere to create neighborhoods with a mix of housing types, shops, parks, civic buildings - all within a short walk.
But there's a problem, says the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League, in this pamphlet: the rigid zoning laws most American communities have adopted "make it illegal to build new neighborhoods that resemble the best of Charleston." The laws need changing virtually everywhere to allow compact and attractive neighborhoods, says the Charleston-based league. Otherwise, "healthy urban centers like historic Charleston will suffer, with growth in the suburban fringe bleeding the cities of employers, tax revenues and a diverse community life."
Groups like Livable Oregon, Bluegrass Tomorrow and the South Carolina Coastal Conservation League are increasingly in the news, fighting sprawl, championing compact development, urging zoning and code changes to encourage a return to traditional town planning across America.
None of the groups is government-sponsored. A good number, in fact, started life fighting unwanted growth but soon realized that the only way to preserve valued natural areas is to build more densely in cities and towns.
And increasingly, they try to rally forces around a coherent physical model that delivers multiple benefits - land conservation, attractive design, less infrastructure cost, for example - rather than some single cause like affordable housing or saving wetlands.
Katz believes that the New Urbanist movement, spreading rapidly through the planning and architecture professions in the '90s, even hitting USA Weekend and the cover of Newsweek, has given the advocacy groups a big lift. For the first time in decades, Americans are being exposed to the idea that traditionally designed, Main Street-type towns don't need to be historic relics, but can be built anew in our time.
Combine that with what surely seems like a wave of growing revulsion with standardized mega-roads, big-box retailing and characterless subdivisions, and the potential for a new American development pattern begins to emerge.
Critics counter that Americans are still alarmingly tolerant of urban decay and wasteful development, and are more interested in property rights than community life. And changing that attitude in the development industry, from home builders to highway engineers, will be agonizingly slow.
But the Greenbelt Alliance is getting some California localities to vote for urban growth boundaries. The Chicago-based Center for Neighborhood Technology has quickly organized a metropolitan initiative to coax the federal government into shifting policies to support citizen-based initiatives (check <www.cnt.org> on the Internet).
And the Local Government Commission, a Sacramento, Calif.-based alliance of local officials and citizens, is working on a model of sustainable economic development to supplement the "Ahwahnee Principles," an influential regional and neighborhood land-use model for American communities that leading New Urbanist architects drew up in 1991.
And those efforts are just a tiny sampling. Add them up, and you can't be 100 percent pessimistic.
(Neal Peirce's e-mail address is: <npeirce@citistates.com>)
(c) 1997, Washington Post Writers Group